Jail Administrator John Lebel remembers the floods, the fights and the suicides.

AUBURN – Standing in a dank corridor with paint peeling in curls from the cinder-block walls, Jail Administrator John Lebel tapped the cell bars with a toe, looking for the one an inmate had tried to saw apart decades earlier.

He remembered flooded corridors, bunks stacked along the walls and the suicides.

It all seemed strangely preserved.

For 17 years, the former Androscoggin County Jail has sat untouched and empty but for several old bicycles and a few dozen boxes of files. In some cells, graffiti still covers the walls and ceiling.

It may soon disappear.

County commissioners have issued a call for bids to demolish the two-story building, which sits beside the county courthouse.

“The jail has been sitting there doing nothing,” Commissioner Helen Poulin said.

Once it receives bids, the commission hopes to decide whether the county can afford to tear down the derelict jail. The resulting space overlooking Turner Street might become parking. A renovation has not been ruled out, though.

“We need to find out the costs,” Poulin said.

Before the new jail opened next door in 1990, the old jail was slated to be transformed into office space. However, commissioners at the time scrubbed the plan and closed the doors.

It created a kind of time capsule of local corrections in the 1980s, with floor-to-ceiling bars and disciplinary cells.

“I have so many memories down here,” said Lebel, who was hired as a guard in 1977. “It was a rough, rough place.”

On his first day, he was ordered to clean out a floor duct opposite a cell and found two knives and five hacksaw blades, apparently dropped there from a grated window.

Such stories were common, he said.

Though designed for 27 people, the jail sometimes held 60 or 70 inmates. It was used between 1969 and 1990.

Unruly prisoners sometimes flooded the entire place, plugging up their toilets and flushing until several inches of water covered the floor.

“Most of the time there were only three of us (guards) inside,” Lebel said. Inmates would start fires or throw urine or feces at the guards.

Suicides were common. Without modern surveillance or a large staff, sometimes prisoners had as much as an hour before a guard passed. It gave inmates time to assault one another or to damage their cells.

The image popularized in movies – of a guard tapping the bars with a nightstick as he walked past a cell – came directly from real life, Lebel said.

“They weren’t trying to be jerks,” he said. “They were listening. If a bar was sawed, even a little bit, it had a dull, dead sound.”

The county’s current jail has no bars. Mostly, its a collection of cinder blocks and electronically controlled steel doors.

“It was a different time,” Lebel said as he walked through the old jail.

And the 1969 jail was an improvement over its predecessor.

For more than a century, beginning in the 1850s, an older jail housed prisoners in a four-story structure. It also is surprisingly intact.

Over the years, renovations to the 1800s jail have absorbed it into the county complex, making it impossible to raze. It now contains office space, a kitchen and central dispatching. However, on its rarely visited top two floors, also used for storage, cells that once overlooked a steep, four-story drop are still preserved.

Inmates would often throw themselves over the rail and fall to their deaths, Lebel said.

Some of the cells tell their own stories.

One third-floor cell remains covered in soot from a decades-old fire that legend says killed its occupant.

On this day, the blackened door made of steel mesh sat wide open. A few doors down, a swastika decorated a cell. Another carried a more benign message typical of the late 1960s, when it was last used.

Above the door, someone had scratched a peace symbol and the words “peace cell.”